Jeremy Bennett of http://www.embecosm.com/ will give a presentation on Open Source Software Meets Open Source Hardware: OpenCores and the OpenRISC 1000 architecture for The BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf) on Monday 17th October 2011, from 1830 to 2100 hours.

This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments.

OpenRISC was conceived in 1999 as a project to specify a RISC processor architecture and hardware implementations that were entirely open source.

The OpenRISC 1200 was the first implementation of that architecture. It has been in use for around a decade and is powerful enough to run Linux. Now on its third revision, the processor is widely used in research projects, and has also been used in a number of commercial products.

The project has spawned a host of peripheral hardware components, so that several complete systems-on-chip are now available. All are open source and hosted on www.opencores.org.

Any modern chip relies heavily on software. Tools to design the chip, software tool chains for programs to run on the chip and operating system infrastructure. For OpenRISC, nearly all that has also been achieved using open source software.

This talk will introduce the OpenRISC 1000 project, focussing particularly on the role of open source software. Involving hardware leads to some interesting open source licensing problems, which will be addressed in the presentation.

The final part of the talk will be a practical demonstration of OpenRISC in action, using both hardware and the architectural simulator. All the software will be available on DVD and attendees with Linux laptops are invited to join in the practical part.

Timetable

18:30 Buffet and refreshments

19:00 Introduction to OpenRISC 1000

20:00 Break (Buffet and refreshments continued) and opportunity to install the OpenRISC simulator
and tool chain.